Fiona McCade: Some royal skeletons are best left hidden

Fiona McCade. Picture: TSPL

FIONA MCCADE

TYPICAL. You wait 528 years for one dead king, then three come along at once.

On Monday, archaeologists proudly proclaimed that the skeleton found underneath a car park in Leicester is definitely that of Richard III of England. Now, there is already excited talk of having a proper ferret around for Alfred the Great of Wessex and even Henry I of England, whose bodies have also gone awol over the centuries.

No-one loves history more than me, and I’ve been watching the developments surrounding Richard’s exhumation with great interest, but if we start digging up all the monarchs who missed out on a nice tomb, there are going to be quite a few car-parks turned over before we’re finished.

Frankly, I find it strange how many people are demanding that Richard be given a big funeral – some even want a state funeral – when all that’s happened is that we’ve found a bunch of bones that used to be a king.

It doesn’t hurt to recall that Richard wasn’t actually buried in a car park. He was laid to rest, with suitable religious rites, in Leicester’s Grey Friars Church (like a lot of other people, who we’re not bothering to dig up, because they weren’t royal enough). It’s nobody’s fault – well, perhaps Henry VIII’s – that the church isn’t there any more. A state funeral would be redundant, since the state of which Richard was sovereign disappeared in 1707. Besides, he catastrophically lost his crown in battle, so he couldn’t very well expect an all-singing, all-wailing wake at Westminster Abbey, could he? Given the circumstances, his original resting place wasn’t too shabby at all. I doubt that Haile Selassie would have complained.

Richard has already had his funeral, so really, all the Catholic church can do is give him a Service of Remembrance (although nobody remembers him) somewhere sufficiently big to please his fans, and a shiny new coffin.

But it won’t end there. Many archaeologists are so enthused by the resurrection of Richard and the attention it’s garnered, they’re gearing up to find Alfred, and Henry, and heaven knows how many other crowned skulls currently lying undiscovered beneath NCP properties across the land. Seriously, where do you stop? Searching for Harold somewhere under Hastings?

I blame the Russians. They felt so guilty about the underhand way they murdered the Romanovs, they tried to make themselves feel better by re-burying their royals with huge pomp and circumstance.

Since we can’t raise the Titanic, we’re going to raise our monarchs instead, but we should remember that, on the whole, if a king doesn’t get a big funeral, it’s because he failed miserably and either got killed in battle, or was exiled, or ran away as fast as his little anointed feet could carry him. What worries me is that public money might be spent, say, checking out where the hopelessly incompetent James VII/II ended up (his bones were lost during the French Revolution), or having a scratch about in northern France for the equally ineffectual John Balliol. In the pantheon of monarchy, these are not people I’m keen to be reminded of.

The final fate of Alexander the Great’s body has always intrigued me, but if we really must find a missing king, I vote for James IV of Scotland, whose corpse was said to have been flown away from Flodden field by four ghostly horsemen. I’d be genuinely interested to know where he ended up.

However, if rehabilitating dead royals is going to become a 21st century obsession, maybe I should set up a new firm, just for regal types who have expired, ceased to be and generally shuffled off this mortal coil in unprepossessing circumstances: Injury Lawyers 4 One. Did one suffer a usurpation that wasn’t one’s fault? Has one been unjustly deposed and one’s body lost to history? Has one been constantly denied the right to a big, fat, royal funeral at the venue of one’s choice? Then contact Injury Lawyers 4 One and we’ll make the biggest fuss we can to get one’s reputation reassessed and restored by qualified academics, quickly followed by the glitzy, fanfare-laden, ermine-lined kick-off into the afterlife one has always felt one deserved.

After all, if England’s utterly useless Edward II can get into an actual cathedral, surely everyone deserves the chance?

This website and its associated newspaper adheres to the Independent Press Standards Organisation's Editors' Code of Practice.
If you have a complaint about editorial content which relates to inaccuracy or intrusion, then contact the
Editor by clicking here.

If you remain dissatisfied with the response provided then you can contact the IPSO by
clicking here.

The Scotsman provides news, events and sport features from the Edinburgh area. For the best up to date information relating to Edinburgh and the surrounding areas visit us at The Scotsman regularly or bookmark this page.

For you to enjoy all the features of this website The Scotsman requires permission to use cookies.

Find Out More ▼

What is a Cookie?

What is a Flash Cookie?

Can I opt out of receiving Cookies?

About our Cookies

Cookies are small data files which are sent to your browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome etc) from a website you visit. They are stored on your electronic device.

This is a type of cookie which is collected by Adobe Flash media player (it is also called a Local Shared Object) - a piece of software you may already have on your electronic device to help you watch online videos and listen to podcasts.

Yes there are a number of options available, you can set your browser either to reject all cookies, to allow only "trusted" sites to set them, or to only accept them from the site you are currently on.

However, please note - if you block/delete all cookies, some features of our websites, such as remembering your login details, or the site branding for your local newspaper may not function as a result.

The types of cookies we, our ad network and technology partners use are listed below:

Revenue Science ►

A tool used by some of our advertisers to target adverts to you based on pages you have visited in the past. To opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.

Google Ads ►

Our sites contain advertising from Google; these use cookies to ensure you get adverts relevant to you. You can tailor the type of ads you receive by visiting here or to opt out of this type of targeting you can visit the 'Your Online Choices' website by clicking here.

Digital Analytics ►

This is used to help us identify unique visitors to our websites. This data is anonymous and we cannot use this to uniquely identify individuals and their usage of the sites.

Dart for Publishers ►

This comes from our ad serving technology and is used to track how many times you have seen a particular ad on our sites, so that you don't just see one advert but an even spread. This information is not used by us for any other type of audience recording or monitoring.

ComScore ►

ComScore monitor and externally verify our site traffic data for use within the advertising industry. Any data collected is anonymous statistical data and cannot be traced back to an individual.

Local Targeting ►

Our Classified websites (Photos, Motors, Jobs and Property Today) use cookies to ensure you get the correct local newspaper branding and content when you visit them. These cookies store no personally identifiable information.

Grapeshot ►

We use Grapeshot as a contextual targeting technology, allowing us to create custom groups of stories outside out of our usual site navigation. Grapeshot stores the categories of story you have been exposed to. Their privacy policy and opt out option can be accessed here.

Subscriptions Online ►

Our partner for Newspaper subscriptions online stores data from the forms you complete in these to increase the usability of the site and enhance user experience.

Add This ►

Add This provides the social networking widget found in many of our pages. This widget gives you the tools to bookmark our websites, blog, share, tweet and email our content to a friend.